Chris Killen: What do you think is the future of publishing/writing in Britain and elsewhere?

Lee Rourke: The future has got to be with the independents, hasn’t it? They’re the only people taking risks, publishing work that matters. I mean, the big conglomerate houses aren’t interested in the continuation of Literature, or culture, that’s how I see it; they just want to sell trash to people who have become mollified by a culture of quick-fix explications; resulting in a brash insistence to disengage from the obscure, a collective escape towards a vapid, homogenised cultural void where celebrity, with its myriad fads, has become a way of finding validity. We are wheeling within a sanitised epoch that is told to shun anything difficult; anything ‘different’… It’s a sad state of affairs, really.